


unchecked growth of a shish kebab

by Cat_Face



Series: suicide [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:00:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22089772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cat_Face/pseuds/Cat_Face
Summary: thinking kills
Series: suicide [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1469855
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	unchecked growth of a shish kebab

‘It’s alright even if he does this.’ That’s the conclusion he’s come to. He’ll admit that he’s thought about it a lot, whether it be the pain during it or the pain after. The failure. The disappointment. The time. The cost. But more than anything, he’s thought about the reason why.

It doesn’t so much hurt to think about than it is fun, in a way. To think about it, to have control over what he’ll do or what he’ll say or what he’ll become...it’s nice. It’s easy. It’s curious. He thinks it’s the curiosity part that really hooks him. He wants to know what death feels like, and he’s too afraid to wait until someone, or something, decides that it’s his time. He remembers watching the History Channel on TV and learning about a man so preoccupied with death that he, too, committed suicide, and he likes to liken himself to that man. Have a TV channel besides Fox or CNN broadcast about him and his endeavors. It’s a funny joke. Always makes him laugh.

And he wonders, too, when it was that he became so jaded. ‘He’s not.’ That’s the conclusion he’s come to. He likes his life, really, but he likes the idea of death more. It always sounds silly in his head when he confirms with himself that exact statement; why wouldn’t it, when he needs to be alive to even ponder death? And it’s silly in the manner that he doesn’t know what happens after death, too. He has neither religion nor a stout belief in science to give him an answer, and in hindsight that’s probably what made him fall into this loop of thinking and thinking. A limbo of misty, murky, dirty possibility. That’s what it is. That’s all it is.

When his brother was born, that brought about a new glaring light in that limbo that made him think, ‘well, maybe I oughta stay alive for this.’ To see his little brother grow up a few years...it was nice. It wasn’t easy. But it was curious all the same, but in a different way. It got him really thinking, then, about how Peter would grow up past the year of seven. Would he grow up like his older brother and start to think about death too? Would he be willing to talk to his older brother about his strange fascination? Would he, too, think about committing suicide to chase after it? 

Would he leave his older brother behind?

The idea scares him so much that he’s tried not to think about it. It’s occurred to him that maybe his parents would feel the same way if they knew. That maybe his mom would cry if she learned that everyday, when her son takes his dinner back to his room and eats all alone, he thinks about killing himself. That maybe his dad regrets ever teaching his son about guns for fear of the rampant teenage angst in the world driving people to suicide. That maybe both his parents love him, and that they’d be sad if he was gone. 

But it’s alright, he thinks. He’s not alone anymore, and his parents love Peter just as much as they love him. It’s easy to recover from a death when there’s something to grieve with. It’ll take time, and it’ll take effort...but Peter is young and easy. Trauma doesn’t affect kids that young if they never see it.

So on a day he’s home alone, a mere half hour after he’d rejected going out shopping with his family with a meager excuse to do a non-existent project, he takes his pen and he writes on his most expensive cardstock in his neatest handwriting. He finds that it’s easy to write, and that his fears of being unable to get the words from his head are a wisp to the wind. He writes ‘I love you’ perhaps half a dozen times to each of his family members, and he lists his greatest memories with them one by one. 

He writes about how he still remembers his dad forgetting that it was his wife’s birthday. He writes about him getting dragged to Victoria’s Secret by a panicking middle-aged man with only the words ‘polka dot; 38C’ painting his lips a chapped salmon. He writes about how he saw the cutest girl he’s ever seen in his life, surrounded by striped mannequins in sexy lingerie and panties costing three-times his monthly allowance, and he writes about how his dad had pulled him to the corner to pep-talk him about getting her number. 

He never got her number, but he got to see his dad go from a bumbling apologist to a suave and sporty man in less than three minutes. So he writes ‘thank you’ to him, and he writes ‘I love you’ again. 

He writes about how his mom kept him up in the wee hours of the night to try and bake her husband a cake. The kitchen had been so dusted up by flour that it seemed a fire broke out, only instead of draggy grey smoke, it was bleached particles of near inedibleness. His mom never gave up even then, so he writes about how she made him read out the cookbook instructions word-by-word, slowly, then made him show her the pictures like a kindergartener’s story time. He writes about how beautiful and silly his mom looked donned in a purple apron so fluffed with flour that it looked white, with brown hair frizzing upwards and over her head, clumped with bits and pieces of dough. He writes about how she misspelled the word birthday in ‘Happy Birthday,’ and how neither of them realized until his dad came home from a three-day long trip and pointed it out. 

‘What’s Birdtay mean, honey?’

He smiles as he writes that phrase, slowly, and when he rereads it, all of a sudden his eyes grow hot, and he squints as wetness spills over. It drips down his cheek and off his chin. His eyeballs tingle in his sockets, behind the lids, in that pleasantly warm way when he blinks them clear, and he wipes the tears away with his hands and finds himself sniffling. Dry sniffling; not a lot...and it doesn’t hurt like he thought it would. His chest is overbearingly warm. Most of all it feels euphoric. Like he has so much love to give.

So he writes it into his little brother’s section, and he writes about how tired he’d been during the hospital stay. How scared he’d gotten thinking about the complications of birth, how stupid he’d been looking up hospital horror stories on his phone as the plastic of his shoelaces jangled the metal legs of the chair he sat in. He writes about how his dad held his hand for the very first time in his life and smiled at him, saying, ‘If she gave birth to you, she oughta be able to birth little Peter. Don’t worry,’ in that same voice he’d used to tell him to get that girl’s number. He writes about how he’d been paralyzed and petrified, glued to his spot on the floor, as his mom screeched and screeched as she pushed his baby brother out. 

‘I’m never going to put any girl through that,’ he writes. ‘It looked like it hurt so much. The smell of pain was stronger than the smell of blood.’

And he rereads that sentence and thinks about how much of a poet he could be. He writes in his own little laugh, a small ‘lol’ in parentheses. Then for some reason a couple more tears slip out, and he doesn’t know why, nor does it hurt. He wipes them away and continues to write.

The emotion he’d felt when he laid his eyes on his newborn brother’s face...he can’t seem to do it justice. It was cosmic. He’d started crying, right there in the hospital room, silently, and his hands shook by his side. Every touch to Peter’s bloodied and misshapen head by his mom’s soft, motherly fingers translated to his own, and he kept his own fingers loosely open so as to treat his brother gently by proxy. He doesn’t know any other time he’s felt his chest squeeze and explode and collapse within itself, or any other time he’s felt his feet lose their weight. He doesn’t know any other time he’s felt so scared.

He writes about how he’d been comforted by his little brother crying in the night, about how it meant he was still alive, still breathing, still feeling. He writes about how it was easier to sleep now that he heard the shuffling and the murmured complaints of his parents in the wee hours of the morning; about how, when he was in his thoughts of suicide and death, he listened closely for the cooing of his brother and the hushed singing of his mom. He writes about how happy he was every morning when he got to see his dad trying to teach Peter how to spell out his name with the big lettered blocks, about how much he laughed to himself thinking about him saying, ‘this is how you spell Birthday, Peter. Don’t be the same as your big bro and your mama, OK?’

He writes it out, all of it. He writes everything he can remember until he can’t anymore, until he drops his pen to the side and covers his face with his hands, shuddering out wet breaths and sniffling through a sucked-in nose. The distinct taste and sour feeling of a mass behind and between his eyes makes him cry even more, and he’s sobbing, and it feels nothing like the time in the hospital; it feels like he’s crumbling to pieces and he wonders and wonders if he should do this. If he can. If he will.

Because he’s never ever going to see his little brother grow up into a person able to spell his last name, never going to see him on his first day of high school and see him have his first ever crush and have him come up to his older brother and go, ‘do you know what girls like?’ and in the time Peter grows up, he’ll miss it all. He’ll never ever hear Peter’s nasally high voice go ‘Ja! Ja!’ in substitute of his name again, never ever going to see those grabby hands play with the little red pick-up truck that _he_ used to play with, never ever going to witness his mom perfect the birthday cake that _he_ never got, never ever ever ever and he loves his brother so much that it hurts, he loves his mom so much that it burns, and he loves his dad so much that he can barely think about it all without feeling hotter tears well up past his lash line from beneath his upper lids.

But he knows that this pain is temporary while his affliction of obsession is forever. Already the screeching regret and hesitation ebbs away, allowing that same euphoria to flow into him from nowhere but himself. Once again he’s filled with so much emotion that the only thing he can identify it with is ‘love.’

So he picks his pen up and flips the completely filled-up cardstock over. In the blankness, he writes ‘I love you’ until the pen runs out of ink, and even then he scratches it in until the bleeding explosive ache in his heart becomes normal, and the violent twisting of his stomach is easy and curious. He reads it over, the million ‘I love you’s carved into the page, then brushes his name in with his finger...because they’ll know who this is. He picks the page up, then, with wet and shaky hands, and finds himself walking calmly to the kitchen.

There lays a plate of wrapped-up kebabs waiting to be microwaved, left for him to eat in case he gets hungry while his family is out. Looking at it...staring at it makes him think. ‘I shouldn’t kill myself with a gun.’ That’s the conclusion he comes to. His dad would blame himself, and his mom would blame his dad, and the scene would be gruesome if Peter were to walk into the kitchen to see his big brother’s head blown off.

So he lays the cardstock down next to the seran-wrapped plate, gently, and blinks his puffed-up eyes, slowly. Hunger is not his biggest worry, but it’s true that he hasn’t eaten since morning. Crying his heart out takes a toll, and it’s silly to say but he hasn’t cried that hard in all his life. Not even when his brother was born. 

So he undoes the seran wrap, feeling it slip between his tear-wetted fingers. The faintest scent of barbecued pork wafts to his nose. The food is from his dad on the Fourth of July; grilled on the ruby-red lip gloss grill him, his mom, and his little brother had gotten two weeks prior for the man’s birthday. 

He smiles looking down at it, remembering the jokes his dad had cracked while wearing his beat-up Sketchers and clicking his tongs together. ‘Why’d Marilyn Manson go to his doctor’s barbecue, Jason? To get his rib back, hah!’ 

He laughs while he picks up the kebab, but then his heart starts to ache when he remembers he hadn’t written that in his note. He wonders if he should turn back to find a new pen to scritch it into presence, but he decides that he won’t. 

Something tells him he’s not going to go through with this if he hesitates now.

So he cleans off the kebab, eating small nibbles at first then hungrily munching down as his mind fades away. All that matters to him is the cold, tender meat squashing beneath the divots of his teeth and the tangy sauce sticking to his chapped lips. He turns the kebab like a flute and eats it sideways, licking clean the wooden stick. Polka dot; 38C. Happy Birdtay. Broom broom, look Ja! I coming Ja! Broom broom! 

He’s crying by the time he’s sucked clean the wood, gentle tears that feel out of place and faraway from what he’s feeling. The slightly charred wood blurs in his vision until it’s nothing more than a wide and dark blob between his fingers. But it’s OK, he thinks. ‘I don’t need to see.’

So he takes the stick to his ear, then, and he slides in the sharp tip until he feels his ear canal claustrophobe around the wood. His heart beats hard but distant, and an impending sense of doom starts to build up and up and up until his fingers shake and his feet almost lose their weight. He wonders if he’ll die from this, wonders if he’ll live. He wonders if he’ll even be able to listen to his brother speak if he survives, if he’ll become a vegetable weighing burden on his family.

He prays to a god he doesn’t believe in—all of them—that they pull the plug if he does, and then he shoves the skewer in with enough force that it goes out his other ear.


End file.
